Those who pitched the NASCAR Hall of Fame deliberately lied to the public and the taxpayers about the attendance projections. They also knew they’d have to subsidize the thing to keep it afloat. But they were willing to say anything to beat out Atlanta as the location chosen by NASCAR. That was back when Charlotte’s main concern wasn’t survival as a financial center, but proving that it had the chops to be an up and coming world destination, something so distant now that no one even talks about it anymore.
We know they lied because Tim Newman, then the chief executive of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, blabbed about it to the Charlotte Observer in October, admitting that he didn’t care if they numbers were correct as long as Charlotte won the hall of fame.
“I admit we were wrong,” said Tim Newman, the chief executive of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority that headed the city’s effort to get the shrine. “We should not have been talking in those numbers. Because it was a public competition you had those numbers out there. We were trying to win the business.
“I was not as concerned about the validity of those numbers at that time.”
That the NASCAR Hall of Fame is bleeding cash now can’t possibly come as a surprise to the Govco crowd.
With attendance down 35 percent in July and a loss for the month of $143,742, they have a real problem on their hands. Back in the build a world destination days, they’d have just shifted tax money from somewhere else and then claimed police were starving so we need a tax hike.
That’s infinitely harder now. But the failure, or Gosh Forbid shutdown of the hall of fame would be thing of shame. It will be interesting to watch what they do now.
